Democratising Online Education, Online Teaching Platform Teachmint Is Helping Million of Tutors Across India Teach Online For Free
The lockdown provided the edtech ecosystem with the opportunity to truly shine, and almost all edtech companies witnessed a massive inflow of traffic.
Despite the opportunity, the pandemic posed a huge challenge for individual tutors offering education through offline setup.
Understanding the on-ground challenges many teachers face, a startup created a SaaS-based mobile-first end-to-end solution, enabling tutors to continue teaching online without having them deal with fragmented and complex digital tools.
Teachmint is an edtech startup that enables teachers to digitise their classrooms and start teaching their students in just 2 minutes.
Startup Story: Teachmint | Online Teaching App
Founding Team
Started by Mihir Gupta, Divyansh Bordia, Payoj Jain, and Anshuman Kumar, Teachmint is an all-in-one education technology platform created specifically for the tutors of the digital age.
Teachmint offers a SaaS-based mobile-first end-to-end solution that enables teachers to host and record their classes. The platform also enables them to hand out assignments, take attendance, and more. Teachmint app provides teachers with features like automatic attendance, automated notes creation, public streaming, class recording, whiteboard session, and other controls.
The founding team has enormous executive experience and have worked at OYO, McKinsey, Swiggy, and Roposo. The founders recently were featured in Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list.
How Teachmint Started?
Been involved in his family’s CBSE-affiliated school located in a remote area in Madhya Pradesh, Payoj was aware of the on-ground challenges teachers face without easy access to tech.
Mihir says,
“We were looking at edtech for quite some time. Then, with the lockdown unfolding, all tutors we knew began struggling to teach online using disconnected solutions. Conducting classes on Zoom, Google Meet, Facebook Live; managing communications over WhatsApp; conducting assessments over Google Forms.”
Understanding the situation, the four launched Teachmint with a simple Android app in April 2020, allowing tutors to hand out assessments to their students, share study materials and even automate their workflows like taking attendance, creating logs, etc.
Mihir adds,
“Through word of mouth, by the end of 10 days or so, there were hundreds of tutors already using the application, onboarding students trying live classes on the platform. That is when we realised that we are solving a critical problem and started looking at it from a much broader perspective.”
The team witnessed that almost 75% of Teachmint tutors prefer to take their live classes on their mobile phones, and around 95% of students attend these classes on their mobile phones. So, they decided to be a mobile-first product.
[Read: Delhi-based Startup Lazy Gardener Is Making Home Gardening Simple Using Plant Food Sticks]USP Of Teachmint
Working with a mission to democratise online education, Teachmint provides ease in online teaching, trust and accessibility to everyone.
Teachmint is a horizontal product built entirely in-house for teachers educating — K12, hobbies, fitness etc. and has been customised keeping varying conditions in mind like low data bandwidth.
The platform is free for tutors and has a focus on regional customisation, available in 10 Indian languages other than English. As per Mihir, these features make Teachmint the only vernacular video conferencing app in India, with even the video solution and instructions available in all 11 languages.
Using the app, teachers can create and share a unique link for their classroom through messaging applications and social media. By just clicking on the link, students can enrol and join. Additionally, the platform enables tutors to create white-labelled websites that list all the courses and demo lectures conducted by the teacher. The platform also provides a direct collection of fees for tutors through multiple modes using payment facilities.
Though the platform is built intuitively for easy use, if a tutor still needs hand-holding with the app functions, the startup has a support team of 20 people.
Present Situation Of Teachmint
Currently, Teachmint serves one million+ teacher and covers users in more than 1,500 cities and towns.
As per the startup, more than 90% of the 1 million+ tutors using the Teachmint platform have at least some students that are outside of their immediate city. Additionally, the startup claims to have seen 200% m-o-m growth for the past few months.
Mihir says,
“We will be gradually creating more paid options in lines of subscription service, as well as business enablement solutions for tutors to generate more demand. But the basic solution will always remain free for teachers and students. Because ultimately, classroom digitisation is needed everywhere.”
Future Plans
Teachmint plans to invest in adding more interactive features to the platform. The startup looks at adding an administrative layer to its platform that will enable it to form B2B partnerships with institutes.
With its recent funding of $20 million, Teachmint became the fastest EdTech startup in India to raise $40 million. The funding amount will help the development of live teaching technology and fuel Teachmint’s expansion into newer markets and the hiring of skilled talent.
For more stories of startups, click Startup Stories.
Follow us and connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.